Did you know that people move by the law of minimum effort? Our brain tends to work strategies that minimize energy consumption. If you imagine yourself picking figs from a fig tree on a hot summer afternoon, in the Extremaduran senara, you will surely visualize yourself raising your hand and picking the closest ones, the ones that require the least effort.
This is how the extraction and production of materials works. We start by extracting those that require the least effort (energy, resources). Over time, when these become scarce, we must apply more work (energy) to extract those that are more difficult to access or of poorer quality. Who does not remember that scene from the movie Giant in which oil gushed out of the ground, as if by magic, without any kind of effort? Those times are behind us and today the effort to extract oil, natural gas or coal is much greater and the qualities obtained are much lower.
The fracking of oil, bituminous sands, subsidized coal or the maritime transport of natural gas are deformations of a system that tries to survive while other more sustainable energy alternatives still cannot cover the drop in productivity of these more traditional sources. And the same happens with other resources, such as uranium (nuclear energy), rare earths that as the best mines are exhausted, their extraction involves more energy expenditure and the generation of more waste and contaminated land.
Some so-called renewable energy sources also face the same problem, since the places where they are installed are the most optimal and each new installation has to choose spaces where their solar, wind or hydraulic profitability is lower.
As it analyses in the study The limits to Growth, that analysed the economic exponential growth and of the population and the direct affectation to the available resources by means of simulations computerizadas, the present energetic crisis is a crisis of exhaustion of the resources but no because we remain us without them but because every time it costs more achieve them, are less profitable, produce more pollution to obtain them and are of a lot of worse quality.
The conjunction of all these problematic generates a periodic perfect storm in the energetic sector, that every time has a greater impact in the society and in the economy. We confront us to what the science has designated the 'Peak Everything' that requires of a bet decided by repensar the systems of consumption, the innovation in sustainability, the models of economic growth and each one of the decisions that take individual and collectively to be able to guarantee a better future for us and the coming generations.